Fixing a broken user experience featured on Smashing Magazine

There’s innumerable ways to arrive at a state where a company’s product offerings present a frustrating or broken user experience. Few organizations can’t realistically throw everything away and start over. If it’s broken, you need a strategy that allows you to iterate toward a better user experience. Cooper’s Stefan Klocek outlines one approach Cooper uses with clients to improve user experience across an organization’s suite of products.

From the article:

Unless you’re developing completely new products at a startup, you likely work in an organization that has accumulated years of legacy design and development in its products. Even if the product you’re working on is brand spanking new, your organization will eventually need to figure out how to unify the whole product experience, either by bringing the old products up to par with the new or by bringing your new efforts in line with existing ones. A fragmented product portfolio sometimes leads to an overall broken user experience.

Understanding an organization and its users and designing the right interaction and visual system take exceptional effort. You also need to communicate that system to teams that have already produced work that doesn’t align with it. This isn’t easy work. In this article, we’ll introduce you to a strategy for fixing the broken experience that starts with surface improvements, goes progressively deeper into structural issues and ends with a big organizational shift.

Read the rest of the article, meet The Hierarchy of Effort (pictured below), and enjoy the discussion over at Smashing Magazine.

The hierarchy of effort to fix a broken user experience.

The Editors

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